There is a longstanding general problem of providing proper configuration for telephony systems, since this normally involves accomplishing numerous complicated tasks. Typically, many different management screens need to be accessed in order to enable a telephony feature. Accordingly, it is often the case that the person assigned to accomplish such a task is himself highly-trained to understand specific applicable telephony terminology and interdependent functionality of these screens, and to recognize the completeness or incompleteness of his interactions with the numerous management screens. Simply stated, today it is often the case that the person assigned to enable a telephony feature must be an expert; in each combination of telephony systems' implications of his respective telephony feature enablement.
For typical customer telephony management tasks, such as setting up the switch/feature server or configuring an existing communications switch/feature server, previous attempts to reduce telephony management complexity have used two types of solutions: Menu Hierarchies and Task Wizards.
Menu Hierarchies are user interface elements which are grouped in a hierarchy of menus or tree controls, according to the system designer's notion of relationships between different elements. For instance, monitoring-related forms might be grouped together under the “monitoring” menu or tree-branch. In some cases, an additional “navigation” dimension is offered by hyperlinks connecting elements in a non-hierarchical manner. A severe limitation of this approach is that complex systems (e.g., an IP PBX) typically have many relationships between management elements that are difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model in a way which will make it easy for the user to navigate between them while performing a given task. For instance, it might be possible that, when troubleshooting a given element of a system, the user might need to efficiently navigate between a provisioning form and a monitoring form, which the system's designer had never perceived to be connected in a way that will merit a hierarchical or a hyperlink relation.
Task Wizards relate to a set of management elements that are related to a given task (e.g., forms) and are grouped together in a workflow that directs the user- to a predetermined order of operations needed to perform a certain task. Here, as in the Menu Hierarchies methodology, the system's designer has prescribed a set of tasks (e.g., installation), while scenarios without predetermined direction, such as troubleshooting, become potentially intractable under this methodology.
Considering Menu Hierarchies and Task Wizards together, we have come to recognize that the logical order and organizations of operations (to accomplish even a predetermined task) may be reasonable and straightforward to the systems designer, who resides in a telephony intense culture, and simultaneously vague and incomprehensible to a customer, who resides in a business (non-telephony) culture. Typically, the customer is far more focused on his methods of doing business than on the technicalities of the telephony instantiation, which he must set-up or configure in order to return to his more-pressing (non-telephony technology) business activities.
Considering Menu Hierarchies and Task Wizards together from another vantage (the globalized marketplace), the system's designer may presume certain functional and organizational conceptualizations as being commonplace to persons of his national origin, while these same conceptualizations may seem awkward or oblique to persons educated according to another national organization standard, linguistic grammar, etc.
Now, the longstanding need in the telephony arts is more specifically (A) for easing and simplifying the currently-complex process of configuring an existing switch/feature server; and most particularly (B) for setting up the switch/feature server to work properly as required by the customer setup. Core components for meeting this need (to provide general and specific progress to overcome this longstanding need) are well-known in the telephony arts (e.g., components found in four recently granted U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,289,964-7,216,350-7,069,291-7,054,818—each briefly described below). However, perhaps because of the peculiarly compartmentalized nature of the telephone technology industry, the integration of these core components (e.g., tags, indexing, user interfaces, navigation, and work-flow management—all in telephony technology applications) has neither been proposed nor demonstrated for this purpose.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,289,964 “System And Method For Transaction Services Patterns In A Net-centric Environment” relates to embodiments of a method for implementing transaction-services patterns, comprising the steps of: (a) batching logically related requests for reducing network traffic, including the steps of managing a group of business objects necessary for a transaction in a logical unit of work, and grouping the logically related requests received from the logical unit of work into a single network message, wherein the logically related requests include at least a dependent batched request and a parent batched request; (b) indicating whether the dependent batched request depends on the response to the parent batched request, including the steps of receiving a register that the dependent batched request is dependent upon response data from the parent batched request, receiving a response to the parent request, directing data from the response to the parent request to the dependent batched request, and receiving a response to the dependent batched request based on the response to the parent request; (c) sending the single network message to the group of business objects necessary for the logical unit of work; (d) sorting the logically related requests that are un-batched from a batched message; and (e) providing multiple logical units of work operating concurrently, wherein the logical unit of work is one of the multiple logical units of work, such that each of the multiple logical units of work manipulates at least one of the group of business objects that is common to each of the multiple logical units of work, including the steps of creating a copy of the common business object for each of the logical units of work such that the copy of the common business object for each of the logical units of work is a separate instance of the common business object, and verifying that a change to one instance of the common business object does not change the other copies of the common business object.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,216,350 “Methods And Apparatus For Call Service Processing By Instantiating An Object That Executes A Compiled Representation Of A Mark-Up Language Description Of Operations For Performing A Call Feature Or Service” relates to embodiments of a method for providing telecommunications services, the method comprising the steps of: generating a compiled representation of a textual description in a mark-up language of operations for performing a call feature or a call service; instantiating a feature object embodying the compiled representation; instantiating a context object that maintains information regarding a present state of the call feature or service in response to a boundary event with respect to the call service or the call feature; the context object signaling the feature object in regard to events occurring with respect to the call feature or the call service; and the feature object responding to said signaling from the context object by effecting execution of one or more of the operations in the compiled representation of the textual description in the mark-up language, and passing notification of at least selected events to the context object, wherein the textual description defines a set of rules and actions for providing the call service, said rules and actions corresponding to a call policy associated with a subscriber.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,291 “Systems and Processes for Call and Call Feature Administration on a Telecommunications Network” relates to embodiments of a process for providing instructions to a telecommunications switch, said process comprising: (A) receiving from said switch a request for instructions for telecommunications services to be provided; (B) with a service agent, responding to said request, by performing steps comprising: (i) generating a query for transmission over an IP network for retrieving from a knowledge base information relating to the services to be provided by said switch in response to the request; and (ii) formulating instructions to said switch based on the results of said retrieval by converting to one or more switch instructions logic contained in information retrieved from the knowledge base, the switch instruction being used by said switch to respond to said request; (C) forwarding to said switch in real-time the results of said formulation; and (D) indexing the location of said records in said knowledge base according to keywords contained therein.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,054,818 “Multi-Modal Information Retrieval System” relates to embodiments of a method, comprising: receiving a document in a structured language that includes tags associated with portions of the document; using said tags to provide a speech mark-up language version from said document; and using said tags, and the same said document, to provide a visual mark-up language version from said document.
Summarizing, in a critical aspect, the problem is to provide facile user-safe means (A) for easing and simplifying the currently-complex process of configuring an existing telephony switch/feature server; and/or (B) for setting up the switch/feature server to work properly as required by the customer telephony setup. In this context, facile, from the customer vantage, means easily adaptive to the organizational presumptions of how he undertakes to accomplish his configuring and/or setup tasks. In this context, user-safe, from the systems designer vantage, means including sufficient structural safeguards to navigate the user “forwards” to complete his task and to navigate the troubleshooter “backwards” to rectify complex combinatorial functional interactions, including human-error-introduced particulars.
Clearly, the current circumstance is that those working in this area have a high level of technical knowledge. Perhaps this has led to a failure to perceive the great economic benefits which should accrue from labor cost savings from a system (i.e., the instant invention interface) that would allow such responsibilities to be accomplished by those of substantially lower technical understanding. Accordingly, while the longstanding need may at first be perceived as simply a luxury item to ease the professional responsibilities of the highly trained telephony technician, in fact appreciating the longstanding need presents an opportunity to vastly improve the labor economics of a large segment of the trained telephony technician population by assigning many of their current tasks to individuals of substantially lower levels of telephony understanding. Proceeding along these lines, one should even be able to empower customers to accomplish more configuration and setup tasks without need to access customer support service providers.